It doesn’t prevent exploration
All of the little intricacies in Destiny 2 are starting to come to the forefront.
While hardcore players who are paying attention to the leaks knew that Sparrows wouldn’t be given out like candy, or early out in the main questline, it’s starting to really hit everyone as the game rolled out last night. That’s right, the Sparrow, the main mode of transportation in the original Destiny that you could call and mount up anywhere, is gone.
In Destiny 2, you’ll need to play quite a bit to earn a “bright engram,” and hope that it randomly drops from it. Bungie did this to prevent players from blowing by open world content, but to me, it kind of highlights a weird lack of trust — as in, Bungie is assuming the playerbase wouldn’t be mesmerized by some weird nook and go check it out.
There’s plenty of precedent for this, by the way. In MMOs, you often can’t unlock the next mode of travel (it’s almost always flying) in an expansion until you either 100% an area or the expansion itself (which is the case for Destiny 2, as you’re given one at the very end of the campaign). But the common thread with those games is that some form of mounting is available early on, typically a third of the way through. And those are bigger games, with larger areas to explore.
I think this is something Bungie will go back on. One of our own readers made a great point about how strange it is if some of your friends are getting Sparrows to do patrols with, and you don’t have one.
